ABSTRACT
The jurist Marcianus listed the methods of obtaining slaves which Roman law recognised as legitimate: fraudulent self-sale, capture in war and descent from a female slave. Ownership of a slave could be acquired through inheritance, donation or sale—always assuming that the vendor was the slave’s legitimate owner. Just as in early modern West Africa, many slaves were bought from ‘barbarian’ tribes at recognised ‘Ports-of-Trade’. Although piracy was a major source of new slaves during the period of the great expansion of slavery in the Roman world in the second century BC, it was not recognised at all in law. Slave-owners were well aware of the psychological effect that their change of status had on free men who became slaves.
